Lake Bell just might be the most interesting actress in Hollywood

Lake Bell might just be the most interesting actress working in Hollywood today. She’s 35 and describes her career as a “slow burner”. You may or may not recognise her from her self-confessed stint as “sexy movie girl”, taking supporting roles in films such as No Strings Attached (where she played a neurotic klutz), What Happens in Vegas (as Cameron Diaz’s best friend) and It’s Complicated(Alec Baldwin’s trophy girlfriend).

But in 2013 Bell wrote, directed and starred in one of the year’s best comedies, In A World…, a very funny and quietly feminist story set in the micro-community of voice-over artists, which won her the Waldo Salt screenwriting prize at Sundance. Now she’s taking her first romantic lead role in a major movie, starring opposite Jon Hamm in Million Dollar Arm, a feelgood Disney production about a sports agent’s attempts to scout a major-league baseball pitcher in India. “I’ve certainly never done anything like this before,” she says, down the line from New York. “It’s nice to have something I’m proud to show any of my family members, whether it’s my grandmother or my godchildren.”

Like all great Hollywood success stories, Lake Bell’s career began in Sidcup. She came to England as an 18-year-old to study at a Rada summer school, and quickly became determined to stay on to study drama full-time. “I remember there was one school that I thought was pretty groovy,” she says, “but it was no frills and it was called Rose Bruford College. They offered a bachelor of arts honours degree, so I thought, OK, I’m just going to do everything possible to get into this school. And I ended up staying there for three-and-a-half years. By the way, the first year was in Sidcup and then you upgrade to Deptford. That’s going to be the name of my autobiography: “Upgrade to Deptford”. I actually lived in Charlton so I had a little Mini and I would commute.”

Lake Bell in Million Dollar Arm

Her mother had wanted to her to study in England, and Bell says that her stint here helped her to take herself more seriously. “Drama school in England is respected in a way that’s very different than in the States,” she says. “In England it’s considered interesting. If you told people at a dinner party that you were an actor, they would say, ‘Oh, how interesting, and how noble!’ In America, if you say you’re an actor, they’re like, ‘You mean you’re a waiter?’ ”

Soon after Bell graduated she left behind south-east London and headed for Hollywood, where she took lucrative roles in television shows: an ill-fated Alicia Silverstone comedy called Miss Match, Surface, a mystery about marine biology, and a recurring part in the comedy-drama Boston Legal.

All the time, however, she was writing, financing herself with her TV pay cheques. “I never wanted to be an actress who had a screenplay, who would talk about it and never show a thing,” she says. “I didn’t tell anyone I was writing when I was writing. And then I was on a TV show, actually, and met a writer in the writers’ room there. I kept going in to pitch ideas to her. And I remember her looking at me and saying, ‘Are you like a closet writer or something?’ And I remember feeling relief to come clean and say, ‘Yes. Yes, I am! I am a closet writer! My name is Lake and I write, you know.’ ”

The pair started writing together, and wrote a film that got close to being produced. “But it all fell apart. And that was a great lesson, because in Hollywood, not to sound like I’m 65 years old, looking down, but in Hollywood it often happens.” Bell had been working on the movie for five years, but she didn’t let its failure crush her. She forged on, taking a short film, Worst Enemy (“a comedy about a female misanthrope who gets herself stuck in a full body girdle”), to Sundance in 2011.

Two years later she was back with In A World…, a film she also starred in and directed. “I thought I didn’t have the audacity to direct a full-length feature without having directed something before,” she says. “It seemed absolutely absurd, like, who do I think I am? But I knew I always wanted to try it and I felt like it would appeal to my personality and my strengths. I’m incredibly comfortable multi-tasking a thousand things at once and answering a billion questions that have to do with a creative endeavour. I’m just very comfortable in ping-ponging all of those back in rapid fire.”

Given the dearth of female directors in the film industry, Bell’s chutzpah is striking. “Within the indie movie circuit there’s a lot of female talent,” she says. “That said, the studio system still has a way to go. Part of me has a theory on that, that ladies are less inclined to sign on to a big budget kind of studio film, because if it is a failure for whatever reason, even if it has nothing to do with them, then they will have a far more difficult time getting another chance.”

Bell has always had a lot of get up and go. She was, she admits, a precocious child, growing up in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Yeah, unfortunately I can’t hide from that,” she says. “I did all kinds of parlour room plays for my parents. I had a show called the Late Lake Show that was basically a procrastination tool when I didn’t want to go to bed. There was also a sort of musical revue that I did, to Harry Belafonte music. When we moved to Florida, the tropical weather sort of influenced my performances.”

Bell’s mother was a designer and one-time model, her father a property developer who bought several racetracks, where Bell hung out as a young woman. She loves cars – “I grew up around tracks and cars and the appreciation of the machine” – and ended up writing a characteristically sparkling test drive column for The Hollywood Reporter (“Now I know what it’s like to have a trophy wife. I had a torrid affair with a candy apple red Bentley Continental GT coupé. Do I care what people think? No! She makes me feel alive”).

When her parents divorced, writing was one outlet, and comedy – mostly in the sense of making her brother laugh – another. She would write long, elaborate letters to her mother and brother whenever she went away to camp; soon she was writing poetry and short stories and then she became captivated by writing dialogue. Sometimes, though, she likes just being an actor for hire. On Million Dollar Arm, she says, “it was a welcome change to step on a set and feel like I don’t have to answer a thousand questions and I don’t have to be the captain of the ship”.

Bell married the tattoo artist Scott Campbell in 2013 and is now seven months pregnant. “I couldn’t sleep last night, which is normal,” she says. “Because there is lots of kicking going on right now. I keep on envisioning that the baby is moving furniture in there. It feels like there is a lot of redecorating going on. I can’t even identify… is that a heel, or is that a couch?”

Last year her husband painted her body for a nude cover of New York magazine; previously she’s done sexy photoshoots for men’s magazines. But for Bell, there’s nothing jarring about this sort of publicity. “I think it’s just hilarious that people still feel uncomfortable that a woman who expresses her sexuality or femininity can then not also be an auteur or a writer or a director,” she says. “Being a writer or a director should not negate femininity and sexuality.”

Bell says she’s rarely recognised when she goes out, which is as she would like it. “I think when you go to drama school there is this respect and reverence for the slow burn,” she says. “And to just be famous is not acceptable.”